Conveners
Nuclear models and astrophysics
- Liam Gaffney (University of Liverpool (GB))
Nuclear models and astrophysics
- Liam Gaffney (University of Liverpool (GB))
We present a short overview of the realistic shell-model, in which the effective Hamiltonian is derived microscopically from free nuclear potentials within many-body perturbation theory. In particular, we give a sketch of our theoretical approach, namely the $\hat Q$ box-plus-folded diagram method, to determine the one- and two-body matrix elements of the effective interaction and show how...
The abundance of about half of the stable nuclei heavier than iron via the rapid neutron capture process or $r$-process is intimately related to the competition between neutron capture and $\beta$-decay rates, which ultimately depends on the binding energy of neutron-rich nuclei. The well-known Bethe-Weizs\"acker semi-empirical mass formula [1,2] describes the binding energy of ground states...
Nucleosynthesis in Type I X-ray bursts (XRB) proceeds eventually through the rp-process near the proton drip-line. Several N=Z nuclei act as waiting points in the reaction network chain. Astrophysical calculations of XRB light curves depend upon the theoretical modelling of the beta decays of interest, with 68Ge being a key nucleus in this context. Several such theoretical calculations have...
Type-I X-ray bursts are interpreted as thermonuclear explosions in the atmospheres of accreting neutron stars in close binary systems \cite{Schatz1}.
During these bursts, sufficiently high temperatures are achieved (T$_{peak}$ $\sim$ 0.8–1.5 GK) such that ``breakout'' from the hot CNO cycle occurs. This results in a whole new set of thermonuclear reactions known as the $\textit{rp}$-process...
The Coulomb excitation of $^{66}$Ge has been performed for the first time using ``safe'' bombarding energies at the HIE-ISOLDE facility at CERN. Motivation to study $^{66}$Ge arises from the anomalous rotational behaviour of the high-lying first 2$^+_1$ state observed in even-even isotopes in the $A \sim 70$ region [1]. Low-lying 0$^+$ excited states have been determined for even-even...
